Petty Apple is petty. Amazon, Kobo, and others have changed their applications to conform to Apple's App Store rules, and if there's one word that describes the situation these booksellers are in, it's petty. Still, it's leading to good things: Kobo has announced it's going to bypass the App Store by writing an HTML5 e-reader for iOS (and thus, for other HTML5-capable mobile devices).

Really? It's a blade splitting a hair. "Splitting hairs" is an expression that is quite common here in the States (and apparently in Thom's corner too). It's another way of saying someone is being pedantic, or that they are arguing incessantly about a minor detail while ignoring the bigger picture. In other words, they don't have a real argument but still want to argue.